Service providers are continually challenged to deliver value and convenience to customers by, for example, providing compelling network services. One area of development has been cloud based services that enable providing on-demand compute, storage, software service, and platform service among others to enterprises. This on-demand convenience has spawned significant adoption by an ever-growing number of consumers. Communication between Enterprise sites and the cloud-based services today often relies on building overlays over existing connections between the cloud provider and the enterprise site. These overlays require capabilities, such as IP tunneling, on both ends and provisioning but do not involve the network service provider underlay network. Thus, the connection capacity is limited to what is provided by the undelay network service provider networks. An Enterprise currently must predict their service needs prior to use and include those extra costs prior to need. Should unpredictable needs occur, enterprises need to order additional services and wait for them to be provisioned by the service provider. It is often the case that an enterprise has a virtual private network (VPN) provided by a network service providers that interconnects its private sites. Thus, leveraging that by dynamically, connecting a new cloud-based service to that VPN, will not require any additional networking capabilities at the enterprise site. However, it requires interaction with the network service to create the connectivity needed to the enterprise VPN at the cloud-provider side. There are also cases where the cloud service provider buys network services from a network service provider to interconnect its own data centers. The demand among these data centers and the type of connectivity could also be time variant. Unfortunately, dynamic provider-based network services based on need have not been available in all these cases.
Based on the foregoing, there is a need for efficient provisioning of communication services. The goal may be to offer services that satisfy the requirements of individual users while guaranteeing at the same time an efficient utilization of network resources.